PDF export messes up placed PDF, and is affected by mark/bleed settings

Report · Jul 20, 2023

I've never seen this weird problem before. I received a PDF of an ad. It had some extra white and a few other oddities, so I cleaned it up a little in Acrobat Pro (which I have done before with many ads), then placed it in InDesign as I always do. But when I exported the page to a PDF, the ad appeared wonky. How wonky depends on whether I include bleed, printer marks, both, or neither, which should have nothing to do with content inside the page boundaries. There is a black rectangle in the background of the ad, and its size gets reduced for no logical reason.

For a test, I placed it three times on a page (shrunk so they fit), placed as bounding box, crop, and media. I added borders so I could see the real edges. Then I exported the page with and without crop marks and 3mm bleed. (I use the "smallest file size" preset, but other quality settings act the same.) I also exported a JPG so you can see what I'm seeing in InDesign. The results are attached, as well as the original ad PDF I'm placing. And although in the test the combination of placed as crop and no marks/bleed looks okay, when I enlarge it to the real size I want to use, it goes wonky again (see "Page 27.pdf", with just a thin green border so you can see where the edges are). The area exposed by the shrinking black rectangle is not transparent but white, so adding fill in InDesign is not a workaround.

I use Windows 11 with InDesign 18.3 and Acrobat Pro 2023.003.20244. It appears that the original ad PDF was made on a Mac with Quartz PDFContext, but that's pretty typical - in fact, I think I have even received ads from the same person before. I've never seen export do anything like this.

Report · Jul 21, 2023

Hi @OsakaWebbie ,

I think indeed that could be an issue with the Quartz module.

Hope that this is not an early incarnation of a new bug that is visible with InDesign 2023 version 18.4.0.

Currently you are working with version 18.3.0 so I do not recommend to update InDesign to 18.4.0.

For reference the new bug with 18.4.0 see into this thread:

ID 18.4 PDF Export using Printer's Marks & Document Bleed shows incomplete rendering opening in Acro
Astronomie-Québec, Jun 27, 2023
https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/id-18-4-pdf-export-using-printer-s-marks-amp-doc...

For now I have no time to look deeper into your files.

I'll find time for this tomorrow.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Report · Jul 21, 2023

Thanks for the heads up! I could work around a problem with one ad (convincing the person who made it to let me use fonts I have access to and rebuild the ad myself), but if I become unable to export the resulting magazine with marks and bleed, yikes! I'm crossing my fingers that InDesign doesn't update itself somehow - CC's Preferences says auto-update is off, but although I don't remember asking for updates in a long time (months), seven of my nine installed apps are up to date.

If you get time to look at the files tomorrow, it's appreciated. Meanwhile I'm dropping hints to the ad creator that rebuilding might become necessary. (I don't like the font she chose anyway - it has a very weird M glyph.)

Report · Jul 22, 2023

Hi @OsakaWebbie ,

InDesign definitely has an issue with this PDF that was created from MS Word on macOS.

In Acrobat Pro all looks good, everything is on the right place and in the right scale. Also if you place the ad on a page in InDesign. But when it comes to export the placed PDF a lot can and will go wrong. Up to the point that some objects in the PDF are scaled in a wrong way and therefore obscure others.

That is definitely a bug with InDesign's PDF Export ( Print ).

At the same time PhotoShop is able to open the PDF as smart object where nothing bad happens.

So one option could be to render the PDF with PhotoShop to 600 ppi or even 1200 ppi, save it to JPEG maximum quality and place the image on the page in InDesign. In this case make sure that the PDF export options for the PDF that you do with InDesign for your printers does no downsampling of images.

I tested a lot. Saved the ad PDF in Acrobat Pro to PDF/X-4 for example. Placed that in InDesign. But the issues grew up more and more when I exported the final page out of InDesign with crop/bleed marks enabled. My hope was that the issues go away when I use no crop or bleed marks. But this was not the case.

In the end I think, that rendering the PDF to pixels in high resolution is the only way to deal with the problem directly.

But of course you could redo the ad with InDesign if you have time and budget for this.

Important:

Please go to InDesign UserVoice and do a bug report:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs

Come back when done and give us the link to the report so that we can vote for fixing the bug.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Report · Jul 22, 2023

I don't think InDesign v18 is the issue. I was able to reproduce the issues with older versions as well (all the way down to CC2020 v15). There's something definitely amiss with the Ad PDF, as the same "issues" would occur if you place the ad in an Illustrator document and then export a PDF of any kind from that, so it's not InDesigns fault.

How to solve:

As a prepress person, normally my first attempt is to resave the PDF as a Press Ready PDF. Unfortunately, this did not solve it in this case.

Secondly, I would PLACE the PDF in an Illustrator file and then flatten it, converting type to outline sin the process. This did not work in this case, in fact, the results were even more spectaculalry wrong.

Third, export the PDF as an EPS (PS level 3). Place that and make a new PDF. Successful in this case.

OR, Export the PDF as Postscript (Level 3) and Distill that to a new high-res PDF (No downsampling). Also Successful in this case.

Yes, you can open the PDF in Photoshop and render it as a high res image and (as mentioned by Uwe) make sure your final PDF is not downsampled. This of course might make a final PDF a bit unweildly. If you do this, make sure you render it at least 600dpi NOT ant-aliased. This will keep the white reverse text crisper in the final print.

Report · Jul 22, 2023

Brad @ Roaring Mouse said:

"Third, export the PDF as an EPS (PS level 3). Place that and make a new PDF. Successful in this case.

OR, Export the PDF as Postscript (Level 3) and Distill that to a new high-res PDF (No downsampling). Also Successful in this case."

Hi Brad,

thank you very much for the additional tests with EPS. And the print to PostScript plus distill test.

Both results are better than to render the ad in PhotoShop.

Still I think this is a bug with InDesign's export to PDF mechanism.

And it's an old one. Just tried InDesign CS6 version 8.1.0 on my Windows 10 machine and can already see some issues:

[1] Placed the ad on a page with the media box enabled.

[2] Exported to PDF/X-4 with downsampling disabled. No crop or bleed marks. Result: NO ISSUE

[3] Exported to PDF/X-1a with downsampling disabled. No crop or bleed marks. Result: Some parts of the add are either scaled with wrong factors or are moved around and are cropped.

See into the InDesign document plus the exported PDFs that I attached.

Note: To get the *.joboptions files attached I had to rename them to *.jobotions.txt.

So remove the .txt suffix if you like to test them.

Well, also printed to PostScript and distilled the PostScript file:

The result was a distorted PDF. Also attached.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Report · Jul 23, 2023

It happens in any program I've placed the PDF in: Illustrator specifically exhibits the same issues, and even Pages!

Ironically, I placed it into a new Mac Word document and created a new PDF from there and it was just fine.

I took into PitStop in an older version of Acrobat, and the background "black" similarly disappeared, so it's definitely an anomaly with this particular PDF.

In the end, I found the easiest solution for the OP is to place the PDF as-is in InDesign, make the background of the graphic frame Black (in RGB to match the PDFs space), and all is golden.

Report · Jul 23, 2023

Also: the Ad PDF was created on July 17, but was modified on July 20. Curious as to what happened there... that may be where thngs went awry.

Report · Jul 22, 2023

Yeh I've seen it before - what I've noticed is that Acrobat doesn't actually crop anything, it just hides it outside the area. And if the PDF is not well formed then InDesign can't read these hidden areas - a non-well formed PDF can happen from a 3rd Party PDF creator.

Typically what I do here is re-fry the PDF.

I'd actually take this and either recreate it properly - which wouldn't take long at all.

Or fix it up and then re-postscript it back to PDF.

If that's how it behaves when InDesign - then imagine what a foreign RIP is going to read it as.

You're better off redoing it by either recreate or refry.

Report · Jul 23, 2023

Here's the corrected ad, if you want it

Report · Jul 23, 2023

Sorry I have been so slow to reply here, but for the last couple days I've had unrelated other fires to put out. The day after this all started, I rebuilt the whole ad in InDesign (with an Adobe font the original person was happy with). If she had been determined to use the original font, I would have made a high-res image of the ad as suggested by Uwe. The hardest part of recreating the ad was getting the wavy blue frame as a vector - I forgot exactly how I did it, but it involved Word -> Illustrator -> InDesign.

But I was still interested in how this bug analysis would turn out. Thanks to everyone for all your testing. It seems like there isn't anything to report to the InDesign UserVoice, since it has the same problem in other software, so the culprit is the original PDF. It would be nice to know what combination of software versions on the ad creator's Mac causes it (she did try the export again after changing the font, but it still had the problem, so it wasn't a fluke), but figuring that out might not be possible or worth the effort. The biggest thing I've learned is to carefully inspect print-ready PDFs before sending to press even if things looked fine in the mid-term.

The editing on July 20th was me tweaking it in Acrobat Pro to align elements better. That is not when things went awry - the original PDF has the same problem.

Brad, you said it worked to make the fill color of the graphic frame black, but I had already tried that - in my case, there was no change in the visual output, so apparently the area vacated by the erroneously shrunk black rectangle is white, not transparent. I'm surprised that worked for you.

Report · Jul 24, 2023

@OsakaWebbie said: "It seems like there isn't anything to report to the InDesign UserVoice, since it has the same problem in other software, so the culprit is the original PDF."

Hm. Here I do NOT agree.

Adobe Acrobat Pro can show the ad without any problems.

PhotoShop can render the ad as it is intended. No issues, no flaws.

InDesign messes things up under certain conditions with its PDF Export.

So, in my opinion, there definitely is a bug to report.

( It does not matter if other software has also its issues with this kind of PDF. )

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Report · Jul 24, 2023

Okay, you know better than I do what is or is not appropriate to report. Here's the link to the report: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/46973860-certain-placed...

Report · Jul 24, 2023

Thanks!

Voted and commented your report.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Report · Jul 24, 2023

It's a flaw in the PDF in this case. I looked at it once again in PitStop and copied and pasted the background, which was the only object that was out of whack, and deleted the original one, and resaved. The resulting file was perfect through InDesign.

Also, I noticed the person who did the ad had used text boxes with a thin black stroke that were showing in front of some of the text at the bottom (noticeably over the name "Michelle .... " line). That and the picture of Michelle had a transparent drop shadow below it that was also on top of that block of text making it go slightly grey. I have fixed both issues. @OsakaWebbie revised file attached:

Report · Jul 24, 2023

I guess I didn't notice that line when I cleaned up other things in Acrobat Pro (the edit you noticed on 7/20), including other lines, a typo in the text, etc. But since I ended up rebuilding the entire ad in InDesign, it's a non-issue - the PDF is no longer needed for the magazine.

Report · Jul 25, 2023

@OsakaWebbie Still, I find the spelunking to find an answer to be a fun challenge. Have a great day!

Report · Jul 25, 2023

Ah, yes, diving in the caves under the code! 😉 Sometimes I do that myself, but in this case I'm glad you and Uwe had the time for it, because I needed to turn my attention to designing the rest of the magazine. In theory, I should only need to design articles and just drop in the ads, but in reality, I often have to clean up ads in one way or another (though normally the issues are visible before I export).

Report · Jul 24, 2023

Brad @ Roaring Mouse said: "It's a flaw in the PDF in this case."

Hi Brad,

well, what's clear for me is that MS Word on macOS is writing very special PDFs using Apple's Quartz engine. Obviously. Seen another case like @OsakaWebbie 's in the forum a while ago. But also obviously Acrobat Pro has no issues with it; please correct me if I'm wrong. Or is an APPE RIP (Adobe PDF Print Engine) not able to handle this kind of PDF?

For pure consistency throughout all Adobe apps that cope with PDFs, Acrobat Pro, InDesign, Illustrator and PhotoShop should treat this PDF equally. Therfore my suggestion to write a bug report.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

Report · Jul 25, 2023

Indeed, I also believe it was an error on Quartz's end.

Report · Jul 25, 2023

I opened the original ad in Acrobat and used the Set Page Boxes tool to set the boxes to zero, this almost fixed the issue, by running the preflight fixup- Set CropBox to TrimBox, the two fixes seems to correct the problem.